Dogmatix

There was an article in today's Post which I am not allowed to link about tax refunds delayed by false submissions. You can search for it yourselves, if interested. The problem is apparently too many people claiming tax refunds based on fake 50 bis forms. 50 bis is the form an employer gives you stating the total amount of income paid and tax deducted in the year. You submit with a paper tax return or after an online one, if you have income from employment. The article said there were 11.9m PIT tax return forms filed for 2023 of which 4.25m were claims tax refunds. I guess the fraudsters made up their own 50 bis forms understating their income to get them below the threshold and therefore get a refund of tax deducted by their employers. Seems quite easy to get caught, since the company also files a copy of the 50 bis form direct to the RD but it must require tedious cross checking by the RD of all tax returns of employees just below the tax threshold with allowances. They say they will solve the problem next year but refusing to accept paper 50 bis forms from companies next year, so the correct salary and tax deduction can pop up automatically in tax payer files. In our context the implications are that the RD is now wary of Thais forging domestic documents to evade tax. When they come to look at evidence of pre-2024 income and foreign tax payments they are likely to be quite demanding in terms of verification, since they know that things like pdf files can be easily tweaked or completely forged.

Tips are income and taxi drivers and waitresses should declare them. So you may leave now.

Despite the severity of the assault, Pattaya police have not detained the security guards involved. Sergeant Major Arthon of the Pattaya City Police Station explained, “We can only pursue a case if a complaint is filed. If both victims went away and died from their injuries, there will be no complaints from them and no need to detain the security guards. It seems police are aware the Helicopter Bar is owned by British nationals. So why haven't they investigated the ownership structure and arrested the owners and their Thai nominees for flouting the foreign business law? Police in resort areas have been ordered to crack down on businesses illegally controlled by foreigners. I guess we know the answer to that one.

No mention of the horrendus taxi mafia that operate throughout Samui, Phangan and Murder Island. That must put a lot of tourists off. They confront the taxi mafiosi as soon as they land and realise that they will not be able to use local transport to hop around the island. They are stuck in the place they are staying or forced to rent their own transport which often means seriously injury or death from riding motorcycles without knowing how to drive them and without a driving licence.

Not on income or interest earned prior to 2024 but on all interest earned after 31 Dec 2023.

Not enough medical marijuana. Keep on toking Anutin.

I find the advice to get a gift agreement drawn up and notarised overseas strange and I am not sure who suggested it, since it is unattributed. Certainly there is no basis for it under the RC or the Civil and Commercial Code. There is no public notary law in Thailand and technically there are no public notaries. Has anyone ever come across a Thai government department asking for a notarised documents? There are Thai lawyers that call themselves notaries and provide notary services for use overseas but that is based on an internal regulation of the Lawyers Association of Thailand, not national law. Thai government departments ask for things to be certified by another government, not by a notary. There is no requirement to get loan documents notarised, even in countries that have notaries and there is far greater likelihood of a dispute over a loan than a gift. So why for a gift document? Personally I think it would suffice to draw up a simple gift agreement which could be drawn up retroactively, if needed.

I don't think the RD can deem a repayment of a loan from offshore as assessable income. They are already stretching that para that they have reinterpreted and their authority by reinterpreting it at all. They can't just decide that what they would like put into the RC by way of amendment is already there because they have wished for it. Anyway the lender could make it a 100 year loan. I have made loans to Thailand that were for an initial 10 year tenor but extendable indefinitely via a board resolution of the lender company. Eventually it suited me to repay them from onshore as the company had sold the property it bought with the loans. However, no one ever queried those loan agreements, not the auditor, the RD or the bank on remittance in or out. In some circumstances loans for more than a certain period can be deemed as income e.g. UK company loans to director. But this has to be written down somewhere. The RD cannot just invent it. I am pretty sure that wealthy Thais will use this sort of mechanism including back to back loans, as was suggested by Prof Kittipong in his article in Thai on the reinterpretation. I was originally planning to do this myself but came across a problem in the BVI which was that BVI companies making interest free loans that are more than short term can be deemed to be lending institutions and therefore "in scope" which means they have to hire local staff in the BVI which is no longer the benign tax haven it used to be following relentless pressure from the EU. From this year unaudited accounts are required for the first time and although these are not filed with the BVI government, your BVI has the right to request more clarification of the accounts submitted and could well challenge the loans, as they stand to make money from providing you with the unnecessary onshore staff. Theoretically you could have a loan from an individual but I don't think from yourself.

This income is assessable for Thai tax, if it was earned in 2024 or later and it puts you over the threshold for Thai income tax plus deductions.

K) The RD publishes an order setting applicable exchange rates for a multitude of currencies from time to time. I think it is quarterly. You can find these orders on the RD website. For the rest there are no regulations or guidelines AFAIK which implies, unfortunately that it is left up to the discretion of individual officers to interpret. International accounts for Thais to invest abroad have existed at Thai brokerages for over 10 years. So these cases must have come up quite a lot where Thai investors didn't want to wait till the next year to remit gains. You or your wife could enquire about opening an international account with a Thai broker and ask them to clarify these matters which they must have had to advise their clients about over the years. P) A straight reading of the RC and orders P, 161/2566 and P. 162/2566 suggest that any foreign source income earned in 2024 or later and remitted by a tax resident is assessable. The RD's Q&A addressed a Thai working in China for some years and wishing to move back home and remit her savings to Thailand. The RD's advice was to remit the money before she becomes a Thai tax resident again. I don't see any latitude to claim exemption once you are a tax resident. Q) The RD stated in the French embassy video that it considers expenditures on foreign credit cards in Thailand by tax residents as remittances and therefore assessable. I doubt they would provide wriggle room to say it was actually a loan from the credit card company or that the bill was later paid with pre-2024 income. The question is how would they find out about, if you failed to declare it. R) An offshore loan remitted to Thailand is not assessable income. There are many instances of this. S) I don't see why a foreigner (or a Thai) remitting a gift to a Thai tax resident should have to report that as income. There is nothing in the RC to support this idea but the only RD case study on gifts implies this is not the case. If it is a gift over the threshold, the recipient has to declare the amount in excess of the threshold and pay gift tax on it. If it is not qualified as a gift at all the recipient has to declare it as regular income and pay tax on that..

It was scary but I figured it out after about 5 minutes of the first call. I asked for his name and rank, unit and office address and said I would search online for that unit and it's phone number and would call him back on the fixed line. He kept giving me the name of a police unit but when repeated my request for the other details he just kept rabbiting on. So eventually I hung up. About 10 minutes later I got another call from another voice but with the same background noise. So I hung up. Then I was showered with calls that I didn't answer for about 3 hours. After the first two or three I noticed they were all 06 mobile numbers which are TRUE I think. I guess someone bought a job lot of TRUE pre-paid numbers. So I blocked any 06 number that tried to call since then. In the first few weeks they came nearly every day two or three times. Then less frequent. I may have blocked some genuine callers with 06 numbers but I figured they would send a message, if it was important. Doing some research I later read a quote from a senior cop well acquainted with this scam who said the police never contact people by phone regarding an investigation. They either send a witness summons by mail or show up with an arrest warrant. I didn't report it to the police because I hadn't suffered any financial loss and didn't expect they would do anything, even though they could trace the buyer of the pre-paid numbers. I am sure many of the master minds have police protection. It is tempting to swear at the scammers or at least report them but I thought twice because they have my name and address and other personal details, may be well connected with police and I have a 3 year old who plays in the streets or our village. It is a clever scam because people get scared when they think it is the cops and many people have done illegal or grey area transactions. One actor, I think, paid the scammers a couple of hundred thousand not to investigate him further which implied he felt guilty about something. It is a digression but my original point is that there are tax scams around and once you are in the tax net, you can be more easily scammed. One that a lot of people have been caught by is scammers pretending to be RD inspectors who have discovered some undeclared income, something many Thais are obviously guilty of doing. They also demand a pay off to drop the case. Another is that they call to let you know you have a tax refund coming and ask for your bank details to pay it, then syphon money from your account. One thing worrying here is that RD officials do call taxpayers on their mobile phones and there is no easy way to verify them. They will give their names, if you ask them but not otherwise. I have had them call about my company and personal tax accounts. But they have no need to call to ask for bank details for a refund. They make refunds via the PromptPay system and have the ability to find you PromptPay account, if you have one, and will make the refund automatically, just sending an SMS to inform it has been done. Given the level of corruption and cybercrime in Thailand, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that a scammer will have all your personal details including your TIN to help convince you. Best thing if you are not sure is to ask for their name, department and address and you will find it online call them back on the fixed line. If it is hard to make out what they are saying, tell them to send you an SMS, if they are calling your mobile. Personally I don't think RD officials should be allowed to call taxpayers direct, as it opens the way to corruption and scamming but sometimes they are just calling to be helpful, i.e. requesting missing documents for you to claim deductions.

Something to watch out for. Scammers are sending letters that look exactly like letters from the RD saying they have received details of your income that have been posted to your tax accoubt and asking you to log in to a fake RD site from a QR code to check but actually to provide personal details in a phishing scam. I saw it in a Thai language LINE group. Once you have a TIN you could fall for something like this, if you get a Thai to read the letter for you. Thai government officials, bank staff and others sell genuine names, addresses, phone numbers and ID numbers to scammers by the thousands. Foreign names don’t necessarily deter them. I was harassed by one of the fake Thai police station call centre scams for months. They make background noise that sounds exactly like a Thai police station from somewhere in Cambodia near the border and intimidate you claiming you have transferred money to someone involved in money laundering or drug dealing. They try to get you to disclose bank statements to prove you didn’t transfer to that person and you are done. They had all my personal details including both my middle names and ID number which could only have been provided by a corrupt government official, banker or similar. The other issue raised is that the RD might eventually get details of overseas remittances and genuinely post them as income to your tax account.

That is not correct. The new finance minister was chairman of the stock exchange in September 2023. The DG of the RD who signed P. 161/2566 is now permanent secretary for finance.

We might wait a long time for the redesigned PND 90 tax return form with the spaces to claim tax credits. Tax credits have already been claimed under DTAs without a new form, so they may not feel a strong compulsion. PND 90 only covers income from employment. So they would also need to redesign PND 91 covering income from other sources. Since it is unclear whether foreign state pensions are considered income from employment, which technically they are not, or income from other sources Or perhaps are not assessable at all like the Thai old age allowance). If they are considered income from other sources state pension income should be reported on the PND 90 tax return which is more detailed and complicated to file than PND 91. Anyone who remits post-2024 interest or dividend income or cap gains & etc will have to fill in PND 91 anyway. Whether income, including state pensions, are considered PND 91 or 90 affects the threshold for filing a tax return. If it is PND 91 (income from employment only) the threshold for tax filing is 120k but, if it is PND 90, it is 60k only.

I was here for a about the last year of tax clearances but I had no idea what the process was like. My secretary used to take my passport and give to a messenger in the morning who went to the tax office and brought it back the same afternoon with a tax clearance stamp in it. I would sign an approval for petty cash to pay for it but can't remember how much it cost.

Since when has it been the role of the Education Ministry to decide what goes on the list of prohibited drugs.

A return to democracy should at the very least involve respecting the results of the election rather than installing this corrupt family owned party in power.

Re the view that remittances generated by use of foreign credit card payments being not remittance of income but short term loans advanced by the credit card provider. I can see the logic to that but doubt it would hold up in the tax court. It certainly wouldn't apply to direct debit cards or ATM withdrawals direct from a bank account. I think a loan would need a specific loan agreement and to come in as a lump some, not in dribs and drabs as the taxpayer makes his purchases. Theoretically you could pay off your credit card with tax exempt pre-2024 income but I think that all remittances via foreign credit card, debit card or ATM withdrawal are going to be deemed assessable, is self assessed or, if the RD somehow finds out about them.

I raised this in Part I but don't have an answer yet. Excluding US social security which is taxable only in the US under the US DTA, how should taxpayers declare state pensions they remit from other countries? There is no state pension in Thailand and consequently there is nowhere to declare income from a state pension in the Thai tax return forms. The closest equivalent in Thailand is an old age allowance which I believe is not assessable. I have been collecting this paltry allowance for a few years, just because I have paid Thai taxes and am entitled to it. It never occurred to me to declare it for tax until now but I just searched in Thai for opinions as to whether it is assessable or not. I didn't find anything definitive yet but chats on sites like Pantip show divided opinion. Some say it is assessable and some not. My personal opinion is that it is not. There is no documentation available to verify this allowance. You just apply at the district office and receive it indefinitely with never any proof of life certificates requested. If assessable, the RD would mention it somewhere in PND 90 and 91, in my view, and would either demand documentation to verify it, which is impossible, or would have confirmation directly linked to the RD from the Finance Ministry which it doesn't, although it does have electronic links to other sources of income and deductions - deductions verified by e-receipts pop right up in your personal tax return account when you log in with a message asking if you wish to claim them. State pensions are clearly not income from employment and there is an argument that they are no different from Thai old age allowances and therefore not assessable, assuming the the latter is indeed not assessable. There could be an argument that the are indirectly income from employment because you don't usually get them without having worked and paid contributions. I suspect the RD would make this argument to avoid letting state pensions slip out of its net but it is a fairly big stretch IMHO that might not stand up in the Tax Court. I suppose they could also argue it is income from investment, if you have to make contributions, but that is a stretch too. The UK DTA doesn't mention state pensions other than pensions paid to retired civil servants. The DTA I have seen that mentions them is the US DTA vis a vis social security. The UK DTA doesn't mention private pensions either for that matter and nor does the RC but they can easily be deemed income from employment or investment..

I would say it is not that the RD will give people a pass in respect of assessable foreign source income remitted in the tax year it was earned in years prior to 2024 due to P. 2161/2566 but that they have for the most part given a pass since the ruling in 1987 that clarified that foreign source income remitted in the tax year it was earned was assessable. This has been largely unenforced.

Yes, Thailand plans to do it and my post was not nonsense. I was simply reporting on what was said in the French embassy video to try to be of some help to those who cannot understand French. It will be extremely difficult for the RD to enforce taxation of foreign credit card expenditures in Thailand by tax residents but that is what they said they will do. It will probably rely largely on self assessment.

The question of whether withholding tax would be deducted from foreign remittances was asked in the French embassy video and the French speaking RD lady said, "Fortunately not".

This case predated the gift tax amendment to the RC. Gifts were tax exempt without limitation then but the definition of gift in the RC but the prosecution case re the huge gift to her brother-in-law was this was not a gift because it wasn't made according to Thai traditional custom etc, based on the same definition that applies to gifts to non direct relatives today. Therefore the prosecution argued it was regular income. Potjaman's defence was that it was a wedding gift two years after his wedding. That was rejected by the court of first instance and the appellate court but finally accepted by the supreme court - money talks. Potjaman's secretary was also convicted for organising all this but later acquitted. Interestingly l can't recall any charges against the recepient of the gift. Not sure what happened to these shares or the proceeds from them when Thaksin sold out to Temasek. .

Somporn co-owns the house with her 74-year-old Australian husband. The article doesn't explain how this is possible. He is unlikely to be a naturalised Thai citizen, since they spend most of their time in Australia. Therefore it is more likely that she owns the home outright and he owns nothing.

Absolutely. I paid double the price from my house in a gated community where some senior cops reside than it would have cost in the same area just outside the gates. Never regretted it for a minute. Friends who bought or built stand alone houses or even houses in low quality gated communities that hire dodgy guards have nearly all reported numerous burglaries. One friend was burgled in a stand alone house in Bangkok by a very small person who climbed in through the small ensuite bathroom window and nicked his wife's handbag from the bedroom and departed without waking them up. He also has a stand alone house on Samui that has been ransacked so many times that he gave up having a TV set or anything worth taking there.